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Thanksgiving

I tremble with gratitude

for my children and their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead

enter and pass among us

in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

-Wendell Berry

Can I Get A Witness?

I am in the midst of reading a beautiful memoir by Timothy B. Tyson titled Blood Done Sign My Name. It is a story about growing up in a segregated South as it was beginning to integrate. It is his story of being the son of a Methodist minister who chose to take the gospel seriously. One of the stories Tyson tells is of the time, in the late 60's, when his father, inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., invited an African-American preacher, Dr. Samuel Proctor, to speak at their church. It is a story both heartbreaking and hopeful and, ultimately, heroic. The story wraps up this way:

My father's lay leader, a wholesale grocery salesman named Carl, had come into Daddy's study in the middle of the controversy about Dr. Proctor. He'd been crying too. It was that kind of year. When my father asked him why, he said, "I went to see one of my merchants this morning, and he said, 'Carl, you go up there to that church, don't you?' I said, 'Yeah, I go up there, I'm the lay leader.' And he said, 'Are you going to support your preacher having that nigger up there?' And I said, 'Yeah, I am going to support him.' And that merchant told me to get the hell out of his store and never to set foot in there again." Carl looked at my father and smiled through his tears. "Preacher," he said, "I've heard all my life about witnessing, but until this morning I didn't know a damn thing about it."

Praise God for those who choose to be a witness with their lives, especially when their livelihood is on the line. Praise God for leaders like Dr. King who inspire preachers like Vernon Tyson who train lay leaders like Carl. Praise God for those today who would choose to lose their livelihood rather than sell their soul.

Trade As One

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Thanks.